Searching in vain for local news that matters to me

In Hackensack, a former bank building at 210 Main St. is slated to be converted into apartments, one of the projects city officials are counting on to revive the faded downtown. I recall the original United Jersey Bank as having a majestic interior, including a high ceiling that was ornately decorated.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

On Page 1 of The Record today, Editor Marty Gottlieb is keeping his eye on legalization of gay marriage nationwide, school news and sports.

The front page carries a follow-up to Monday's report on how wealthy, one-school districts want to lift the salary cap on superintendents imposed by Governor Christie in 2011.

Of course, The Record has always ignored why Christie didn't impose a similar cap on police chiefs, some of whom are paid more than $200,000 a year.

And on the superintendents' pay, the editors never explain why small towns need a superintendent or what that educator actually does (A-1).

Raising superintendents pay would adversely affect Gottlieb's biggest audience, baby boomers and seniors, who pay extremely high school taxes, but that issue is never raised.  

On top of that, the home-rule system of government has proven a huge financial burden to property tax payers with its mindless duplication of services in the 86 towns in Bergen and Passaic counties. 

But Gottlieb, who lives in Manhattan, hasn't a clue, and his local assignment editors have been defending  the system for decades.

An editorial on A-10 bemoans the "brain drain" that inhibits more affluent districts from pursuing the "best and the brightest" to lead their schools.

Why isn't Edtorial Page Editor Alfred Doblin upset about another school issue, Englewood's segregated elementary and middle schools, more than 60 years after the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education?

Local news?

A photo on the Local front today shows a man with a cane who got off an NJ Transit bus on Anderson Street in Hackensack (L-1).

The caption notes the man "negotiates the slush and ice," but fails to report a snowbank created by city plows has blocked the bus stop itself for more than two weeks.

The weather story with that photo doesn't list Hackensack High School as one of the school that closed on Monday.

News handouts

Why did the lazy local assignment editors and the reporters working under them blow their cover in the first paragraph of today's lead story on L-1?

Staff Writers Stefanie Dazio and Abbott Koloff note the arrest of a suspect in the strangling death of Jordan Johnson of Fort Lee was announced in "a news release." 

On Monday, The Record reported on Page 1 details of who killed whom in Friday's murder-suicide in Closter were revealed by Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli on Twitter.

Excessive background

Every story needs background for readers who may not have been keeping up with crime developments.

But today's account of the arrest in the Fort Lee man's death seems excessively long -- perhaps because the editors, no matter how hard they try, can't generate more local Bergen news.

And Sunday's and Monday's stories on the Closter couple, Michael A. Tabacchi and Iran Pars Tabacchi, contain the same exact sentence when discussing the 15-month-old boy who was orphaned, but who isn't named:

The toddler is "by all accounts the centerpiece of a marriage that was taking root in a quiet, suburban neighborhood" (Monday's A-7 and Sunday's A-1).

But nothing is made of the age difference: The husband was 27 and the wife was 41.

The story on Monday also repeated interviews with their High Street neighbors that were published on Sunday. 

No news today, but here are a few second looks

Repairs to the parking lot, roadway and sidewalk of the Alfred N. Sanzari Medical Arts Building on Essex Street in Hackensack seemed to drag on for months, and made visiting Starbucks Coffee a challenge. When I stopped there on Friday, the work had finally been completed.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Some days you have to question why the media spends more time trying to predict the future than they do on reporting what has happened.

In the crystal-ball category, you can put all the speculation in the past few years about who is going to be the standard bearer for the do-nothing Republicans in the 2016 presidential race.

Today, on Page 1 of The Record, Herb Jackson's NJ/DC column on the fate of a new Hudson River rail tunnel also falls into the former, "no news today" category.

But you have to believe the clueless columnist has never fought the horrendous traffic into New York when his lead paragraph mentions the tunnel in the same breath as projects denounced "as wasteful pork" (A-1).

That's in keeping with the policy of The Record's transportation reporters to ignore how difficult it has been in recent years to find a seat on a rush-hour train.

Home rule

Since Jan. 1, the Local section has been filled with swearing in stories and photos, but today, the editors ran an especially unflattering photo of Jayme Ouellette, who was bending to place her hand on a Bible held by her step-grandson (L-3).

Either the new Rochelle Park mayor is pregnant or she is overweight, but readers are left to speculate.

Amateur hour

All of the swearing in stories have run without comment from the editorial writers, who should at least ask residents to hope that the latest amateur elected to run their town will do a better job than the previous one.

In wealthy Tenafly, the editors haven't attempted to explain why residents rejected two proposals that would have had big environmental benefits, an expanded nature center and extension of NJ Transit's light-rail system to the town's center.

Or why town officials didn't override those narrow-minded residents.

A story on the Tenafly reorganization ran on Sunday's L-3.

Nazerah Bugg

Stories on tributes to Nazerah Bugg, 14, the aspiring Paterson basketball player who was killed by random gunfire in September, haven't reported whether police are doing a better job of protecting Silk City residents from gun violence (L-1 on Sunday).

In fact, the image of the police The Record has promoted in recent years is heroic, and the editors have failed to question the job they are doing -- whether it's stopping the murder of innocent young girls in Paterson or burglaries in Tenafly.

This policy has backfired, as shown by all of the woefully incomplete stories The Record runs on pedestrian deaths, murders and other news the police and prosecutors refuse to discuss with reporters.

Editors bury tough words about home rule

The owners of this house on Hackensack's Overlook Avenue refused to sell to high-rise developers, but were driven away by the relentless noise of multimillion-dollar business jets roaring overhead on the way to a gentle landing at nearby Teterboro Airport.

Buried in today's incredibly boring paper are some tough words about home rule in North Jersey -- a subject The Record has tried hard to avoid as property taxes continue to soar.

Way back on A-16, an editorial says "the state's tradition of home rule" has "become a luxury taxpayers can no longer afford."

"Oftentimes, the only people who truly embrace home rule are the officials doing the ruling," the editorial says.

Has it been two decades since The Record ran a municipal finance series on the expensive duplication of services in Bergen County's 70 communities?

In Hackensack, property taxes have gone up and city services have declined, including street paving and the enforcement of speeding and stop-sign laws.

Pray for the Syrians

The only element of any real interest on Editor Marty Gottlieb's front page today is the plight of Syrians fleeing government airstrikes.

Plugs a limo service

On the Local front, Road Warrior John Cichowski focuses his lame column on a single limo driver's complaint about a message board at the George Washington Bridge, and shamelessly plugs the limo service by name.

Then, the supremely lazy Cichowski fields questions from confused, disoriented and delinquent E-ZPass holders.

Hackensack news is missing for yet another day as head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, catch up on their sleep.

Where are his glasses?

In his column on Wednesday, the tired Cichowski had trouble reading a highway safety report and misstated the number of deaths in other states. No correction has appeared.

A concerned reader pointed out the error in an e-mail to managers sent on Thursday:

"Road Warrior mistakes continue to increase, as in his Feb. 27 column on the Governors Highway Safety Association report that showed teen drivers deaths going down in New Jersey in first half of 2012 while going up nationwide in comparison to 2011.

"As shown previously, the Road Warrior continues to make mistakes based on his being unable to correctly report actual data and information from reports.

"The Road Warrior mistakenly indicated that other states, such as Indiana and Tennessee, showed increases of more than 14 deaths in the first six months of 2012, despite their GDL laws.

"The report clearly indicated that NO state had increases over 13.  Increases were 13 for Indiana and 10 for Tennessee."

Read the full e-mail on the Facebook Page for Road Warrior Bloopers:

I'm on deadline, where are my glasses?

More scintillating infrastructure news

A sculpture by J. Seward Johnson at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack was modeled after one of The Record's local-news editors.

Only an engineer could love the front page of The Record today, dominated as it is by the demolition of a Route 3 bridge and much hand-wringing over a tight turn for tractor-trailers in Little Falls (A-1).

But there's more on the front of Local, where the Road Warrior column again gives voice to complainers, whiners and crackpots who seem to have suddenly discovered North Jersey's antiquated road system (L-1).

Along with duplication, inefficiency and high property taxes, our home-rule system has saddled us with dangerous railroad crossings and narrow local roads that haven't been updated much since the 1960s.

You'd think the brilliant journalists at the Woodland Park daily would have called for wider, safer roads a couple of decades ago. But you'd be wrong.

Humoring morons

Instead, transportation writers like Cichowski, desperate to fill space, humor every moron behind the wheel who sends in a bitchy e-mail about traffic congestion or roads with too many intersections or whatever -- no matter how exaggerated or inaccurate.

Years after the lack of mass transit gave us traffic congestion of nightmarish proportions, the only staffer who writes consistently about trains and buses is Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin.

That's because he takes them, as is evident from his column today on the reopened Hoboken Terminal (A-13).

But even Doblin has written more about mass transit since Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29 than in all the years before -- no surprise at a car-centric newspaper that relies so heavily on advertising revenue from automobile dealers.


Another correction


On A-2 today, a correction acknowledges that Editor Liz Houlton's copy editors missed a major error in a graphic that appeared on Thursday's front page.

On L-3 today, a photo caption stated incorrectly that "a flapping billboard halted traffic on Route 17 south," when, in fact, the loose vinyl billboard prompted police to close the road. 

Local yokels

The Local section contains Teaneck news (L-1), but head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, couldn't find anything to report about Hackensack.

Mile-long menu

In Better Living, the centerfold restaurant review makes a fusion restaurant in Wyckoff called Aoyama sound awful (BL-14 and 15).

Readers wonder why the paper didn't just run a few paragraphs of warning.

Fans of Wondee's, Lotus Cafe, So Gong Dong and other places with Thai, Chinese or Korean menus got a belly laugh from co-owner Helena Hsue, who said, apparently with a straight face, "It's impossible to stay open with one Asian cuisine."

Readers also wonder why the review was written by Julia Sexton, a restaurant critic for Westchester Magazine.

Did editors help reach historic moment?

Seal of Bergen County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Home-rule government has long been one of the sacred cows at The Record, which made its reputation as a local newspaper by covering just about every meeting in just about every town in Bergen and Passaic counties.


Small towns fought hard to preserve their individuality and neighborhood schools, but home rule is inefficient and expensive, resulting in high property taxes.

Except for a series on municipal finance -- the infamous "Mun-Fin" in the 1980s -- The Record has stood by as towns have resisted consolidation of any kind and taxes have gone up year after year.

Today, Editor Marty Gottlieb leads the paper with the historic vote to dissolve the Demarest Police Department and merge it with the Bergen County police (A-1).
 
Borough officials say the plan will save $400,000 in police costs, an unknown amount of that in donuts, which the county buys in bulk at a lower price.

The first paragraph calls the vote a "historic first for Bergen County," but on A-8, readers learn Teterboro disbanded its police force in 1992 and contracted with the county for full-time coverage.

So, maybe "historic second" would be more accurate.

But readers long ago gave up the expectation of accuracy under Production Editor Liz Houlton and her band of merry copy editors, even in Page 1 stories.

Shafting readers

Gottlieb also pushed a sports story for the front page today: Alex Rodriguez' career may be nearing an end now that he's thrown out his hip during sexual activity (A-1).

Can't you just hear the snickers among the tabloid copy editors who coined "A-Rod" to fit short-count headlines -- a nickname that hints at his sexual prowess?  

There is so little municipal news in Local, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, had to use a big photo on L-3 -- the latest saga in utility pole news.

Mass hysteria

Monday's front page continued the Woodland Park daily's unprecedented coverage of mass transit, but the bus and rail system maxed out long before Superstorm Sandy damaged hundreds of NJ Transit locomotives and rail cars. 

The editors acknowledge how little they've covered mass transit in the past decade by inserting the word "commuter" before "locomotives and railcars," lest readers think NJ Transit transported cattle, bottled water or organic spring mix.

See previous post on comments 

Editors ignore shameful record

Asked to allow affordable housing, Oradell proposed putting the units into orbit.

The low number of affordable homes in densely populated Bergen County -- only 300-plus in 2010 -- speaks volumes about how state and local officials have subverted two landmark Supreme Court decisions in 1975 and 1983. 

Let's do the arithmetic you won't find in The Record's Page 1 story today about low- and moderate-income units in Oradell.

To reach 300-plus units, each of the 70 towns in Bergen County would on average have to add fewer than five affordable units in the last 28 years (not 35 years, as I mistakenly wrote earlier). What a shameful record.

But today's story ignores everything home-rule communities have done to keep out minorities and preserve their overwhelmingly white neighborhood schools. 

Instead, the patch story focuses on Oradell's objections to a storage trailer sponsors want to use during construction of two duplexes.

Quote of the day

Editor Marty Gottlieb should have put this quote -- which appears on A-6 -- on the front page: 

"I don't think towns are responsible for fixing the racial and social problems of our society," Oradell resident Tomasina Schwarz told a reporter.

That says it all. If not towns, who or what? God? 

We certainly can't rely anymore on newspapers like The Record to bring about change or even accurately describe such issues as the history of affordable housing in Bergen County.

Doesn't compute

Also on Page 1 today, Gottlieb continues to nibble away at the optimistic revenue projections in Governor Christie's budget proposal. 

But on the continuation page, the word "accurate" appears to be missing in the text with the "Projections vs. collections" graphic (A-6). 

One story that should have been on the front page is an interview with Associate Supreme Court Justice Virginia Long, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 (A-3).

Long is more than a trailblazer for women in the law and a champion of individual rights. Check out that stylish outfit.

Instead of putting Long on A-1, Gottlieb continues to bore us to tears with more about the (who-the-F-cares) GOP presidential primaries (A-1). 

What savings?

On head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local front, two stories purport to explore savings from a shared-services court agreement in Bogota and Little Ferry, and an efficiency study by the Bergen County prosecutor. 


But the stories, like so many others before them, fail to explain why, despite these and other savings, home-rule towns continue to increase property taxes.


Today's Local section is one of the thinnest in recent memory -- not so much in the number of pages as in how little town news it carries from big and small communities alike.

What are Sykes and her lazy, incompetent minions doing to earn their keep?

It's the home-rule system, stupid

Image via Wikipedia

When is The Record of Woodland Park going to expose the home-rule system as the real reason our property taxes are so high and when is Governor Christie going to put pressure on towns to join their neighbors in seeking more efficient ways to run schools and keep streets safe? Probably not in our lifetime.


Instead, the former Hackensack daily will continue to publish articles on the high salaries of school superintendents (on the front page today) and the governor will try to get laws passed to put a cap on those salaries, as well as on the salaries of teachers, police officers and, presumably, police chiefs.


Any sign of cooperation among towns gets headlines in the paper, as Park Ridge does today on its plan to hold meetings with Woodcliff Lake and Montvale to discuss saving money. What about bigger towns -- such as Hackensack, Teaneck and Englewood, which have a lot in common? 


In place of the local news editors didn't have for today's paper, a big photo showing the continuing demolition of the old Giants Stadium appears on the front of Local. An A-1 story on drunken fans at the new stadium had too much detail about an accident Friday in the first few paragraphs -- when the focus should have been on the nine fans who tried to cross a highway and whether they had been drinking.


More than a decade ago, The Record launched a project to expose the folly of home-rule finances, including the incredible duplication of services among the 70 towns in Bergen County (map). 

The series, which went by the acronym MUNFIN around the office (for municipal finance), ran with an explanatory note from the editor that the newspaper wasn't trying to bring reform to the broken system. Predictably, the series brought little or no change.

Is there a message in this front page?

Image by Terje S. Skjerdal via Flickr

Teachers protest in Teaneck over state aid cuts and pension changes. A man pleads not guilty in the death of his wife, a Bergenfield teacher (though that phrase never appears in the story). And the executive director of a preschool and child-care agency for Paterson children gets a $300,000 compensation package. That's the front page of The Record of Woodland Park today.

Inside, though, an editorial on Page A-20 finally focuses on home rule as the real reason our property taxes are so high, and urges Governor Christie to devote some of his attention to patronage jobs and the system's incredibly expensive duplication: For example, we have 70 police chiefs in Bergen County alone, and more than 70 school superintendents. 

Of course, this corrupt system is decades old, but The Record's all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful editors have done little so far to expose it or call for its dismantling. Maybe, they are defending "neighborhood schools" -- code for the predominately white education system outside of Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood, Paterson and Passaic city.

Staff Writer Jean Rimbach led an investigation of private but publicly funded preschools about five years ago and wrote a three-part series exposing inflated salaries and other wasteful spending -- as detailed in today's front-page story about Ron Williams and the B.J. Wilkerson Memorial Childhood Development Center. I guess her series, under the guidance of head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes, amounted to little more than a loud, journalistic fart -- and brought no reform.


The same can be said about another Sykes-inspired, Rimbach-led probe -- this one focused on a single man, Michael Mordaga, former chief of detectives in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. 

This was another turd Sykes and Rimbach tried to polish -- as was evident from the single, weak story on the Local front last Dec. 16. Yet, this so-called investigation took nearly three years and squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries for Rimbach and other reporters, including Monsy Alvarado and Shawn Boburg. 

Could that money have prevented staff layoffs?

Now, Sykes apparently has the hapless Alvarado investigating Hackensack Police Chief Ken Zisa, a former assemblyman, forcing the reporter to ignore any other news about River City, where The Record was founded in 1895.

Of course, none of this lousy journalism could go on without a total lack of interest in the newsroom shown in the last few years by Publisher Stephen A. Borg and his big sister, Vice President and General Counsel Jennifer A. Borg. These sophisticated siblings apparently are more interested in the Englewood wine bar in which they've invested.


In Better Living today, vegetarians or families who have taken a meatless pledge shouldn't bother reading the review of Soram, a Korean restaurant in Norwood with a limited menu. 

In fact, Restaurant Reviewer Bill Pitcher apparently ate only one dish without beef or pork. The meat-obsessed Pitcher also mistakenly calls that dish -- bibimbap -- "the vegetarian standby on most Korean menus" (the dish is almost always topped with ground meat, vegetables and an egg -- cooked or raw).  He doesn't even mention whether the restaurant serves complimentary, non-meat side dishes such as kimchi, bean sprouts and fish.

The appearance of several house ads in the food pages today tells you Pitcher, the food editor, seems to be running out of news. What's the explanation for a restaurant health inspection list that includes only 12 of the 90 or so towns in the former Hackensack daily's circulation area? (Photo: Reading the paper in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.)

Sucking up to Governor Christie

Image via Wikipedia

Amid all the negative reaction to Republican Governor Christie's proposed cuts -- which would affect just about everyone but the Borgs and other rich families -- Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin is blaming the Democrats and the people for the fiscal mess we are in.

In his poorly written column on Page A-23 today, this popinjay conveniently ignores how The Record and just about every past administration -- Democratic or Republican -- have tried to preserve the ruinously expensive home-rule system against any attempts to consolidate services and eliminate duplication.

How much support did the Woodland Park daily give Governor Corzine's attempts to make the system more efficient? Does anybody believe Christie is going to be able to cut our property taxes? Isn't cutting school and municipal aid just going to ensure our taxes go up?

How about some background?

Image via Wikipedia

Don't you hate it when a front-page story is not only poorly reported and edited but provides you with only the barest of background? You have that today in The Record of Woodland Park with another in a series about the long-suffering residents of Pompton Lakes. (Photo: A front page from 2007 for comparison.)

Why this story is on Page 1 is a puzzle. Why it doesn't portray this sorry saga of chemical pollution as both a shameful corporate and home-rule failure is only known to the lazy, desperate and incompetent editors who think Bergen County readers are eager for another update on this century old story in a far-off town.

The story says a DuPont munitions plant closed in 1994, but doesn't explain why a cleanup won't be finished until 2015. That's more than 20 years. And it's unclear -- even after a careful reading -- who came up with the idea of building a wind farm next to contaminated homes, where residents would get to trade one form of pollution for another (toxic chemicals for noise and vibration)?

At least the editors had the sense to put Governor Christie's budget problems and possible solutions on the front page for a third day in a row.

If you live in Hackensack, you'll find Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado, who is supposed to cover the city, missing in action for yet another day. There are more than 10 court, lawsuit, police and fire news stories in Local today.

The editors in Business decided one lavishly promotional story about 3-D TVs wasn't enough, so they assigned a reporter to write another for today.

How to bury the real news

The Record of Woodland Park has been defending the status quo for decades, especially when it comes to home rule -- the small-town, local-government system that gave us the highest property taxes in the nation. Of course, the newspaper is trying to hold onto its readers, most of whom live in predominantly white towns that will fight to the death to defend their neighborhood schools.

So what do the editors do with a new poll showing that "a majority of New Jersey voters overwhelmingly support merging their school districts and local governments with neighboring ones to lower ... record-high property taxes"?

Today, they shoved the story inside, to Page A-4, and wasted almost the entire front page on a huge holiday travel graphic and a second story on a possible gas-tax hike with a lead paragraph that is both poorly constructed and inaccurate.

Since Frank Scandale took over as editor, The Record has been blaming high property taxes on the healthy salaries won by police officers and teachers. Under the previous editor, Vivian Waixel, the local staff spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours putting together a series of stories dramatizing just how expensive all these small, municipal governments are -- then ran the stories under an apologetic editor's note assuring readers the newspaper wasn't going to try to change the system.

I wonder what the former Hackensack daily is going to do when Chris Christie takes office as governor? Faced with a projected $8 billion deficit, he has been making pointed comments on the urgent need for local-government consolidation. But Christie hasn't been getting much Page 1 play in The Record since he was elected. And consolidation proposals have been soundly rejected time and again in Bergen County.

The Page 1 story by Tom Davis on the possible federal gas-tax hike is cast negatively -- "drivers may have to pay more" -- and not positively: that it will improve mass transit and ease highway congestion. It seems the newspaper's two transportation writers, Davis and Karen Rouse, and its transportation columnist, Road Warrior John Cichowski, are anti-mass transit.


Before The Record moved its newsroom from Hackensack to Woodland Park, all three were too lazy to cross River Street to the bus transfer station and look at or even ride the decrepit NJ Transit buses patronized mostly by minorities -- a stark contrast to the shiny new buses purchased for commuters to Manhattan. Rouse, handpicked by Editor Scandale from his old paper in Denver, made an excuse week after week about why she couldn't take the time to ride the rickety, wheezing No. 780 bus between Englewood and Passaic.

That's in keeping with a long-standing ban on any stories reporting on the quality of bus and rail service in North Jersey. Nor have we seen any stories on some of the new NJ Transit buses that have begun appearing on local routes. I guess the agency hasn't put out a news release yet.

Who in the world is Al Frech of Wayne? A large portion of the editorial page (A-18) is devoted to his rant about health-care reform and an attack on Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., but Frech is the only one of the opinion writers today who is not identified. It just says "lives in Wayne," as if that confers expert status.

The Local section finally has some news from Teaneck and Hackensack, but is silent for another day about Englewood, Englewood Cliffs and Leonia, the beat of  hibernating reporter Giovanna Fabiano.

The Record's lazy editors love to run stories from other newspapers, such as the Miami Herald piece on Page F-4 about the new beaujolias wine from France. The price of a bottle from producer Georges Duboeuf is listed as $10. But you won't see anything about being able to find the same wine for under $8 in North Jersey.